Also what if pets used visuals of their combat abilities to fight alongside people? Even in my very raid oriented guild, everyone had the WeakAura always making sure their favorite pet was out during raids & dungeons. People like pets.
I never even got a single pet to level 25 because I'd get bored before that, but I still hate the idea of them getting rid of pet battles. I did them sometimes! it was always on my list of things to get to
there's a couple of obvious issues, IMHO. one is that a lot of leveling has to happen in vanilla zones, but the game itself does its best to discourage people from ever going to those zones. (I don't think you can even choose those zones for timewalking leveling, when you pick an expansion from Chromie)
the other is that i feel like there have always been some major bottlenecks where there aren't many pets at certain levels and so it feels like there's a huge jump where you have to try to do pet battles with underleveled pets
ideally, I would fix both of those with some kind of auto-leveling for wild pets like is done for character leveling now, but that would likely be difficult, so instead having more pets at some of the bottleneck levels and putting pets of all levels in the current recommended leveling zones would help
I think it would really help if players could level their pets as they level their characters, as originally intended, instead of having to make special trips to do it
it would probably also help if there were a way to not have to level every pet individually, something where you could easily boost the levels of new pets or groups of pets
I guess really it comes down to the fact that we have all these catch up mechanisms for characters, but none for pet battles, so it's easy to feel overwhelmed, like "I didn't do a ton of this when it started and now it's too late."
Mobile would be AWESOME - it would translate really well, too, as long as Nintendo didn't feel jnfringed.